 | The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity Subjects: JEWS -- UNITED STATES -- IDENTITY; JEWS -- CULTURAL ASSIMILATION -- UNITED STATES; SOCIAL INTEGRATION -- UNITED STATES; EUROPEAN AMERICANS -- RACE IDENTITY; WHITES -- RACE IDENTITY -- UNITED STATES; UNITED STATES -- RACE RELATIONS; UNITED STATES -- ETHNIC; Relationships between American Jews and African-Americans have a long, complicated history. Jews engaged in African-American civil rights work as early as the 1910s. Yet Jewish songwriter Irving Berlin felt a strong need to repudiate the indisputable influence of African-American music on his work. In this original, boldly conceptualized and well-researched inquiry into the complicated intersections of "race" and Jewish-American identity, Emory University's Goldstein explores how Jewish immigrants gradually began to understand themselves as "white" (i.e., fully European) when most of America did not. Goldstein writes that he has framed this book not "as a study of how Jews became white but as one that explores how Jews negotiated their place in a complex racial world," which makes this substantially different from such works as Karen Brodkin's How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. Using a dexterous mix of traditional history, sociology, critical race and whiteness studies. Goldstein brings together a wealth of examples-such as the turn-of-the-20th-century argument that Jews had a "primitive Negro past"-to explore the myriad ways the racialization of Jewishness formed a central tenet of ideas about race in American culture. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved Eric L. Goldstein is associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Emory University. He is also the editor of the quarterly scholarly journal American Jewish History . |
